He's in great form this morning.

My co-worker is all out of sorts because his Conservatives didn't get a majority government. He won't come right out and admit that he voted for them, but he got very defensive when I brought up the DRM bill. "Oh, well, whatever. It's not like they'll be able to enforce it." He then went on to rant about how bad it was that the Liberals picked up as many seats as they did (presumably because he wanted a Conservative majority).

I counter-argued that it was important to have a strong opposition in the house, to keep GWB's mini-me in check. Nope. Wrong. The Liberals deserved to get destroyed in the election because "Dion is a total idiot. He's a complete moron. Everything he does is stupid."

"I'll admit that he wasn't the strongest choice for leader, but name three stupid things he's done to make him such a complete idiot."

"Well, he waffled on the carbon tax. He was back and forth and back and fourth. He changed his mind at least four times."

"Okay, but that only counts as one thing. What else has he done to make him a complete moron?"

"Well, lots of stuff. I can't remember any of it now, but he's done all kinds of stupid stuff!"

... Where have I heard that kind of answer before?

COURIC: But what ones (newspapers and magazines) specifically? I'm curious.
PALIN: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.

[sigh] What bothers me the most is that he is a typical voter. He has no idea what the issues are, he just hopes that the Conservatives will keep the price of gas down so that it will be cheaper to drive his SUVs. (Yes, his family has a "his" and "hers" SUV.)

Hey buddy, can you spare a ride?

I fought the buggy login servers and crash-prone world servers in order to log into WoW last night and check out the new talent trees. I had to re-spec three times because the world server crashed and took my full spec with it, but eventually I managed to construct a half-decent shadow build. I will need to have some decent grinding time, uninterrupted by sporadic server crashes in order to build some good numbers, but once I am done I will post the results here.

On the plus side, I think it may be impossible for me to run out of mana when soloing. VT/Replenishment is a slap-in-the-face joke when it comes to mana return, but the new mechanics of Spirit Tap had me ticking back to full mana between pulls. This won't help much in an instance since I seldom get the killing blow, but it will make levelling a breeze.

On the down side, in my limited experimentation, my DPS looks to be lower after the patch - and this is after I swapped out to better gear. My critical strikes are much larger (3700ish instead of 2400ish), but they coupled that with overall nerfs to most of our other damage spells. I am going to wait until I can run a set of daily quests to see what my numbers look like at the end, but for now it looks like Blizzard may have put one over on the priests. It's possible that my damage meter is borked, but it appears that they have compensated us for removing all of our utility (they are already promising a nerf to VE) by reducing our damage output as well.

Oh, and with the exception of my azure dragon whelp, all of my pets and mounts are gone. Blizzard's initial response was a somewhat cocky, "Don't sweat it - it's just a display issue. We'll have it fixed shortly." to something more akin to, "Um, we're hoping that we can somehow restore those for you..." I know that vanity pets are not a game-breaker, but I jumped through a lot of hoops to get some of those pets, and I am going to be sorely miffed if I don't get them all back.

I am also unimpressed that the game has not credited me with achievements for clearing old-world content. The only one that it has credited me with is Onyxia's Lair, and in fairness to the game, I'd have a good argument if it didn't credit me with that since I still have the Tier2 helm sitting in my bank. I am not going to go back and clear MC, and BWL, and AQ20 and the like just to get my deserved credit for those. I may strive for a couple more titles (I've gained 3 since the expansion: Jenkins, Diplomat and Guardian of Cenarius), but I don't think I'm going to sweat over the buggy achievements.